Read Puzzle of the Red Stallion Online
Authors: Stuart Palmer
Puzzle of the Red Stallion
A Hildegarde Withers Mystery
Stuart Palmer
To
Nellie Secker Palmer
who gave me my first book,
and to Jay Sherman Palmer,
who gave me my first horse.
No real persons or places are indicated in this book. The author desires to take this opportunity of thanking Dr. Ralph M. Crowley of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, and Mr. Reginald “Snowy” Baker of the Riviera Country Club for assistance given in their respective fields.
S.P.
4. Chickens Come Home to Roost
Preview: Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla
Red Sky at Morning
I
F THERE ARE GHOSTS
on the island of Manhattan they walk not in its garish midnights but in the long hour before sunrise. That is the time when life’s tide is said to ebb, so that strong men weaken and sick men die—the hour of the false dawn when Hamlet’s restless father returned to gibber on the battlements of Elsinore.
Manhattan slept, with no dead kings to haunt her turrets and no cheerful cockcrow to send them scurrying. Business had been so bad that night that Mr. Solomon Rosen slept also, his head pillowed on his arms across the wheel of his taxicab, lulled by the diminishing patter of rain on the roof.
He awoke with a start to find an apparition beside him—a remarkably solid apparition that weighed upon his running board. A low harsh voice spoke in his ear—“Follow that hack!”
Sol Rosen peered sleepily at a man in a badly fitting blue overcoat, a harried-looking young man whose breath was heavy with stale tobacco and whose eyes were weary and bloodshot. Sol had never won any silver cups for quickness of thought and at five o’clock of à wet morning he was slower than usual. He blinked and asked, “Why?”
“This is why!” The man in the overcoat displayed his cupped hand. It held a five-dollar bill, and not a silver badge as Sol had somehow guessed. The stranger was pointing across Broadway to the cab rank in front of the Hotel Harthorn. “Tail him—get going!”
He got inside and Sol kicked the starter. Then he noticed that not one but two taxicabs were pulling away from the canopy at the hotel entrance. “Which one,” Sol wanted to know, “the Yellow?”
“Never mind the yellow one,” his passenger ordered. “Tail the Checker, the one in front, and don’t lose him.”
Sol got his cold motor going, roared into an illegal U-turn and rolled southward on Broadway about half a block behind the two other taxis. The rain had stopped and the murkiness of the night had paled to the point where his headlamps were almost useless. The taxis ahead passed Seventy-second, where around the deserted subway entrance the wind whipped listlessly at scattered newspapers. There were no stop lights at this hour and they went steadily on. Sol Rosen was just beginning to hope that this was to be a long and lucrative haul when the two cars ahead swerved suddenly eastward toward the park on Sixty-fifth Street.
Sol followed, with a screech of tires on the wet pavement. He put on his brakes as he saw that the foremost driver was slowing down in the middle of the block.
“Go on to the corner and pull up!” instructed his passenger hoarsely. Sol swung past the other taxicabs and stopped on the corner of Central Park West. The man in the blue overcoat stepped quickly out, handed Sol a bill and moved leisurely away. As Sol Rosen started cruising again he was wide-awake enough to notice that his recent passenger walked as one who did not want to get anywhere. He was strolling aimlessly along, pausing to scratch a match on a convenient lamppost and making it very clear that the last thing in the world which could interest him would be the passengers who were now piling from the checkered taxicab.
As soon as the door was opened a young man in full evening dress had plunged sprawling out, to the detriment of his silk topper. A fat man and a girl followed, she wearing her evening wrap of red velvet hoodwise over her blonde curls and loudly chanting that she “yoost come over from old countree.”
There was loud laughter, but not from the tall young woman who now emerged from the crowded taxicab. She was incongruously dressed in a dark mannish riding coat and jodhpurs. Her auburn curls had been caught under a stiff derby and the silk stock at her throat was fastened by a gold pin in the shape of a polo mallet. She was thirtyish and pretty. She might have been more than pretty if she had taken time for a few hours’ sleep, or even had lingered long enough at her dressing table to remove the make-up which still smeared her mouth and eyelids.
She stood alone on the sidewalk as the others began laboriously to pack themselves back into the taxi. “Good night, Violet darling,” cried the blonde in the red wrap. “It was a lovely party!”
“Even if you did throw us out,” chorused a feminine voice from within the taxi.
“Violet likes horses better than she likes us,” cried a young man in a high tenor voice. “Violet’s queer for long horseback rides in the rain!”
“Good night all,” said Violet Feverel. She was sick unto death of her last evening’s guests and her voice was thin and tired. She waved mechanically as the carload of departing merrymakers rolled away and then turned to face the second taxi which was pulling up alongside the curb.
This vehicle, too, was packed to the running boards. “Change your mind and come with us!” sang out a young man with a very red face whose whim it had been to ride beside the driver. Somewhere he had lost his black tie and somewhere he had found a milk bottle with a dime in it which he jingled as he spoke.
“No thanks,” Violet told him. “Run along—the party ends right here as far as I’m concerned.”
“It’s our loss!” responded the red-faced youth gallantly.
“Good-bye, then—Come on, Eddie, say good-bye to Violet!” He leaned back and prodded at the protruding knee of a young man who was jammed in the corner of the taxi with a girl on his lap.
Eddie was softly singing a ballad of his own composition dealing with the further adventures of the notorious Miss Otis after she broke her luncheon engagement on account of being lynched.
1
“When Miss Otis was dead and safely gone to hell, madam—
They found her a spot where the fires were hot—as hell,
As she writhed in the fearful heat
She gently rubbed her blistered seat and cried, ‘Madam,
Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today!’”
He was rudely shouted down by a chorus of demands that he say good night to Violet, good old Violet.
“Why should I?” demanded Eddie.
“Because Violet’s going bye-bye on a big horsey!” cried the red-faced youth. “She’d rather ride a horse than make whoopee with us in Harlem.”
“Violet,” pronounced Eddie solemnly, “is nothing but a menace to navigation. Someday the Coast Guard will explode her with d-dynamite. She’s an old frozen iceberg, that’s what Violet is, But boy! Am I glad right now that it doesn’t run in the family!”
Somebody nudged him quickly, but not quickly enough. Violet Feverel had heard. She came over and flung open the door of the taxi.
“Eddie—you swine! Did you let Babs sneak in here—as soon as my back was turned?”
The girl on Eddie’s lap raised her head from his shoulder. Except that she wore a white lace evening dress and a last-season’s bunny-wrap, she was just a later edition of the girl who now faced her accusingly. Babs had the same warm reddish curls, the same light-brown eyes. She also had youth, lots of it.
Now she laughed nervously. “Don’t be like that, Sis!”
Violet Feverel bit her lip and her voice was thinner than ever. “I told you you weren’t going on to Harlem with these—these soaks! I told you to stay home and go to bed. Now come out of there!”
As the younger girl hesitated Violet leaned forward and caught her wrist, half dragging her from the taxicab.
Barbara did not resist, but her face had suddenly gone white as chalk. “I’ll pay you back for this!” she said softly.
Her elder sister still gripped her wrist with long painted nails that dug into the flesh. The young man known as Eddie started protestingly out of the taxi but Violet Feverel slammed the door in his face and told the driver to go on. There was a scream of gears and the yellow taxicab rolled on after the first one.
Barbara jerked her arm free. “I’m not a baby—I’m old enough—”
“Back in Syracuse you can do as you like,” Violet snapped. “But here with me you’ll do as I say. And I say you’ve had enough gay night life for one evening … and enough of fooling around with Eddie Fry. When I left I thought you were going to stay there and clean up the apartment, and then go to bed where you belong!”
“Eddie said he’d wait for me with the second taxi after you’d started,” Barbara protested. “It was going to be such fun—and now you had to spoil everything. We were going to a place in Harlem where a big colored woman fries chicken and sings songs….”
Violet knew that chicken and those songs. “You’re going straight home, my darling kid sister. You can get a taxi at the corner….”
Barbara stared at the older girl, her lips hard. “I won’t!” she flared. “You can’t make me. I know—you’re sour on everything because
you
went and made a terrific flop out of romance—”
Violet Feverel struck her young sister across the mouth, as hard as she could.
The marks flamed red on white skin. “Some people would say I had that coming to me,” said Barbara evenly. She turned and walked swiftly back down the street.
“Babs!” cried Violet Feverel. But the girl did not turn. After a moment Violet shrugged her shoulders. She wheeled and pressed a bell marked “Office” under a faded sign, “Thwaite’s Academy of Horsemanship—saddle horses boarded and for hire.”
There was no answer and she pressed again savagely. Then a mild and drawling voice sounded, close enough to startle her.
“You shore got a fast right hand, Miss Feverel.”
She whirled to see a long lean young man attired in blue overalls who leaned upon the lower half of a divided stable door. He had sandy hair, a face tan as a boot, and a long sad upper lip.
“Nobody in the office yet—no use ringing,” he told her. He swung the stable door hospitably open. “But come on in.”
Violet Feverel eyed him. “Latigo! How long have you—”
Then she broke off short. Coming across the cobbles into the dark and odorous warmth of the stable, she caught the scent of rank Burley tobacco.
“Does Mrs. Thwaite know you smoke in here, Latigo?” she asked.
Latigo Wells ground his heel upon a handmade cigarette. He flushed. “Not exactly, ma’am. But there ain’t—there isn’t any real fire hazard with these cement floors. I wasn’t expecting any riders quite so early. You wouldn’t tell her, ma’am?”